Fedora, suitable for servers?

A question I see raised an awful lot over at FedoraForum is whether or not you should use Fedora on a server. There is no straight answer for this; yes Fedora can run a server, and no, Fedora isn't always best suited for a server. Lets look at Fedora on the server in more detail.

Bleeding Edge

Fedora is a bleeding edge distribution. What this means is that it is crammed with the latest and greatest packages, packages that may not surface in other distributions for months, maybe even years. So your Fedora install will have the most up-to-date versions of most packages. This is great from a security and patching point of view, but it does have it's downside.

Because Fedora is bleeding edge, it becomes obsolete quickly. The Fedora lifecycle is incredibly short compared to most distributions, lasting just 6 months before the next version is released. The best way to explain this, is from this page on the Fedora Project web site:

"Fedora Project maintains any particular release of Fedora for a month after final release of the second following release".

What that means is that Fedora 8 will continue to be supported until one month after Fedora 10 is released.

In short: If you choose to go with Fedora, you choose to reformat your server roughly once a year, or let it become out-of-date.

Updates

It has been known on occasion for updates to break a system. Sometimes this can be a simple fix, other times, it may require a complete re-install. Don't get me wrong here, I ran a Fedora Core 4 server for approximately 2 years without a single issue. This is just one of those things that you should be aware of as either way, simple fix or not, it could mean downtime for your server, and that could cost you money and business.

Scale-ability

I'm not going into huge details, Fedora can, and will scale as much as any other Linux distribution can. If you don't believe me, a few years ago there were rumours of a Halo movie, which if ever made, would have been rendered by Weta Digital, who at the time had something like 1,000 dual processor blade servers, all running Fedora Core 4. One can only assume they have an even meatier setup now.

Alternatives to Fedora

The common response to running Fedora on a server is use CentOS (Community Enterprise OS). CentOS is a clone of RHEL, re-badged and without paid-for support. To use CentOS is extremely similar to Fedora. Both are RPM based distributions, aside from the newer packages, Fedora isn't that much different to CentOS. CentOS has around about a five year lifecycle, and a lot more stable updates. If you prefer to have support, by all means go for Red Hat.

Debian is another distribution that is well suited for servers. Debian differs from Fedora and CentOS in that it is not RPM based, but instead uses Debian packages, so may take some getting used to. You wouldn't be wrong to try it on the desktop before putting it on a server.

In Summary

So to sum all this up, yes, Fedora can be a successful server operating system. But does require a little extra care during updates and package installation. It may be an idea to make full system backups before doing a full yum update. Personally, after running Fedora Core 4 for two years, when it did come time to upgrade, I switched to CentOS for the extended lifetime.

Ultimately, the choice is yours to make.